Biometric Update Podcast digs into deepfakes with Pindrop CEO

Deepfakes are one of the biggest issues of our age. But while video deepfakes get the most attention, audio deepfakes – cloned or synthetic voices – are actually the bigger problem.

So says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop. In the inaugural episode of The Biometric Update Podcast, Balasubramaniyan says that although video tends to get the marquee, fake audio does the heavy lifting.

“If you think about it, even in video deepfakes, it’s the audio component that gets you to do something. The video is there, it gives you a visual of the person, but it’s the audio that says, hey, I want you to wire me 25 million dollars. The intent happens through audio.”

Between 2023 and 2024, Pindrop observed a 760 percent increase in audio deepfakes. “And that’s just going to explode even more,” he says. A popular target is retirement homes, and the elderly people who live there – and can be prone to telephone scams. Vijay says fraudsters go to a county, dial all the senior citizens in that county in a short period of time – Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then on Monday morning, all of these senior citizens show up at law enforcement saying, ‘I lost 20 thousand dollars.’ These fraudsters are becoming really programmatic.”

But it’s far from just a problem for the elderly. Deepfakes are everywhere. They’re impersonating employees and potential hires. They’re hijacking executives’ identities to trick workers into transferring millions to fraudulent accounts. And large language models and text-to-speech engines have supercharged fraudsters’ abilities to work at scale.

“Now that we’re seeing a deepfake a day per customer, and some customers that are seeing seven a day – one every three hours – that data is very helpful to get people to realize, the tsunami is already here. We need to continue to increase awareness. Deepfakes are here. They’re going to affect every facet of your life. It’s the most existential problem we have right now. And we all need to band together to solve that problem.”

Hear more about who’s behind all these deepfakes, and how Pindrop uses a technique called “acoustic fingerprinting” to detect them, on this first episode of The Biometric Update Podcast.

Article Topics

Biometric Update Podcast  |  biometrics  |  deepfake detection  |  deepfakes  |  generative AI  |  Pindrop